Imagination is the ability to form mental images and concepts that don’t exist or haven’t happened yet, think outside of current realities, and form connections between existing ideas to create something new and original.
If the number of movie sequels and the outsized popularity of music made decades ago is any measure, our current age is suffering from a deficit in imagination. And indeed, tests show that creativity, which takes the possibilities generated in the mind and produces something with them, has been in decline for many years now — a phenomenon that has repercussions for our personal edification, professional advancement, and societal flowering.
But if our imagination has indeed atrophied, the good news is that it can be strengthened. So argues my guest, Albert Read, the former managing director of Condé Nast Britain and the author of The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them). Today on the show, Albert shares his ideas on how our imagination can be built back up. We discuss how to get better at observation and how to use a commonplace book and the way you structure your reading to cross-pollinate your thinking and generate more fruitful ideas. We also discuss how to overcome the unthinking habit, resist stagnation as you age, and embrace imaginative risk.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Podcast #432: How to Achieve Creative Success
- AoM Podcast #683: How to Think Like a Renaissance Man
- AoM Podcast #357: How to Be a Creative Genius Like da Vinci
- AoM Podcast #874: Throw a 2-Hour Cocktail Party That Can Change Your Life
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Imagination is the ability to form mental images and concepts that don’t exist or haven’t happened yet, think outside of current realities, and form connections between existing ideas to create something new and original. If the number of movie sequels and the outsized popularity of music made decades ago is any measure, our current age is suffering from a deficit in imagination.
And indeed, tests show that creativity, which takes the possibilities generated in the mind and produces something with them, has been in decline for many years now, a phenomenon that has repercussions for our personal edification, professional advancement, and societal flowering. But if our imagination is indeed atrophied, the good news is that it can be strengthened. So argues my guest, Albert Reed, the former managing director of Condé Nast Britain and the author of The Imagination Muscle, where good ideas come from and how to have more of them.
Today on the show, Albert shares his ideas on how our imagination can be built back up. We discuss how to get better at observation and how to use a commonplace book and the way you structure your reading to cross-pollinate your thinking and generate more fruitful ideas. We also discuss how to overcome the unthinking habit, resist stagnation as you age, and embrace imaginative risk.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/imagination. All right, Albert Reed, welcome to the show.
Albert Read: Thank you, Brett. Great to be here.
Brett McKay: So you are a journalist, a writer. You’re a former head at Condé Nast Britain, where you’re overseeing magazines like Wired and GQ. And you’ve recently published a book called The Imagination Muscle, where you explore the power and history of imagination. And you start off the book with this story that you’re out of college, just barely, and you were in a used bookstore. And you came across this book that it kind of changed the trajectory of your whole life.
So what was that book? And how did it set you on a career path in the world of creativity?
Albert Read: The book was called The Secret Language of Film. And it was by this guy called Jean-Claude Carrière. He’s a French scriptwriter.
And he would write scripts for this guy called Luis Buñuel, who is a famous Spanish film director, made surrealist films. And they worked together on many different projects. And one passage particularly struck me in the book, when he said that at the end of shooting a film, at the end of the day of shooting, they would have this exercise where they’d each go to their rooms and force themselves to come up with an idea for a story.
And then they’d meet an hour later in the bar, and then they’d tell each other their stories. And he says that they did it because the imagination is a muscle. It needs exercising.
And it’s an exercise that requires real discipline. And this idea that imagination is something that you can work at, something that you can develop, struck me as a very, very interesting thought that really hadn’t been explored in great depth. We talk about our physical health, and we take exercise, and we do weights, and we stretch, and we do yoga.
And we talk about our mental health and our mental well-being. But what we don’t do, in my opinion, nearly enough, is focus on our imaginative health, on this idea that imagination is something that is a force within us that can be used or not used, or can be ignored, or it can be celebrated, and it can be developed, and it can be something that grows within you. And this idea really stayed with me for 20 years before I wrote the book.
But I wanted to say to readers, I wanted them to consider this possibility that the imagination is akin to a muscle. It’s something that you can develop. It can make you more alive.
It can make you happier. It can make you better at your job. And so this really was the underlying message that I took from the book.
Brett McKay: Yeah, because I think a lot of times when we think of imagination, we think of it as something innate. You either have it or you don’t.
Albert Read: Yeah, exactly. I don’t think that’s true. I think everybody’s got an imagination. It’s like saying, because Usain Bolt runs 100 meters really fast, none of us should try running.
Everybody has an imagination of some sort. Some have greater imaginations. We start from different starting points.
We end up at different finishing lines. But the point to me is to run the race. The point is to be in the game, to use your imagination in whatever way it suits you to use it.
Brett McKay: You talk about in the book that you think our culture today can make developing your imagination more difficult. Why is that?
Albert Read: I think there are different forces at play here. And it’s not completely definitive what I’m saying, but I do see signs of what one could call a quiet crisis of the imagination.
And I worry sometimes that the notion of having ideas, of seeing ideas as something that is important in life, has slightly been eroded by technology, by this idea that the imagination is best left to the professionals, is best left to the experts, to the writers and the filmmakers and the musicians. And in fact, we should all be imagining as we used to do in our more so-called primitive communities. Imagination was something you did together.
You sang, you danced, you told each other stories. And this was something I think we’ve lost. And there are definite data points which suggest that ideas are getting harder to come by.
There’s a study from Stanford that says to sustain growth in GDP per person, the amount of research effort has to double every 13 years to offset the difficulty of finding new ideas. And there’s another test called the Torrance Test, which measures creativity. And that shows that creativity has fallen since 1990 with a steady and persistent decline.
And you see other areas where you see the sequels in Hollywood, you see Netflix ratings going down, you see a kind of possibly a cult of nostalgia in the musicians we follow. So I just want to really draw attention to this and say, are we really being as creative as we can be? Or are we falling into the trap of passivity and a trap of adequacy?
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. Sometimes I feel like culture is very stagnant.
: The sequels with the movies is the most obvious example. But I think it’s interesting.
I look at my kids and my son, he’s 14.
A lot of the music that he enjoys, they’re from bands that started 20, 30 years ago. One of his favorite bands is Cake. And I listened to Cake when I was in high school, and I went to a concert with my 14-year-old son to watch this 60-year-old frontman of Cake sing. It was great, but I was like, where’s my son’s generation Cake? What’s the band that he’s going to listen to with his kids?
Albert Read: Yeah. I have exactly the same thing with my kids, who are a bit older than yours, but they listen to the same music I listen to. A little bit of new music feeds in, but this idea of music defining your generation seems to have gone. It’s now, it arrives in different ways from TikTok or from film scores, and it’s often stuff that even predates our own childhood and teenage years.
Brett McKay: So yeah, the culture’s hard because we have technology that, I think the thing with technology, it can be a source of imagination and creativity, but it’s so easy that you don’t have to exercise that muscle ’cause it makes you feel like you’re being creative and imaginative when you’re really not. Does that make sense?
Albert Read: Yeah, it makes complete sense. I think also there’s a sense of risking a new idea seems harder than it used to because you’re so surrounded by social media and by the attention of anybody that it feels easier to fall in step with a group and fall in step with a mindset of that group, and to step outside it feels a little scary in a way that it didn’t before the advent of social media.
Brett McKay: And I think another thing that social media and the technology we have, one way it can hamper imagination is like, we don’t have as many opportunities to be bored. And that’s when I remember when I was a kid, I had to use my imagination when I was bored ’cause I didn’t have TikTok, I didn’t have, I had to figure things out on my own. I had to get creative.
Albert Read: Yeah. And I talk about this in the book, about the spaces, what I call the spaces in between these gaps in your day, when your mind is allowed to wander, when you’re standing in a queue or whether you’re sitting on a bus. Now we fill these gaps, these small gaps of 10 minutes with checking our email, checking social media. And those were the moments, those were the gaps in the day when people used to have ideas. That’s when George Michael was standing in a queue when he invented the opening sequence for Careless Whisper. And there’s this French mathematician called Poincaré who had been struggling with this complicated mathematical formula for months. And then only as he was getting on a bus, did it suddenly come to him? And it’s these moments when you allow the mind to declutch, you allow the mind to be drifting a little so that these ideas can make themselves known to a mind that’s slightly less attentive to what’s going on around it and less stimulated by its immediate surroundings.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like there’s less chances to exercise our imagination these days, but it’s still important because it can enrich our personal lives. It can help us find purpose in our life. We use our imagination to develop a vision for our lives. Imagination can help us have a rich inner life, help us to see more layers in life. It just kind of makes you feel more alive. But then you also, in the book, you put numbers to this, like it has an economic benefit. It can help businesses thrive, lead to scientific discoveries, move research forward. So there’s stakes here in developing our imagination. And what you do in the book that I really enjoyed was you talk about the idea or the history of the idea of imagination. You give a general definition of imagination as creating connections to create something new. But you also unpack the idea that people haven’t always seen imagination the same way. So what’s the history of the idea of imagination, thumbnail sketch?
Albert Read: Well, the imagination has always been with us as long as we’ve been alive and conscious, but we never knew that it was there. We never knew what to call it. And you see examples of great imaginative feats through history, whether it’s the Homeric poems or the storytelling of the Hakawatis in the ancient medieval Islamic world. But they didn’t know what to call it and they didn’t really have a sense of what it was. And the word imagine comes from this Latin root of imago, meaning to form an image in your mind. And that’s where it started. And for a long time, that’s where it ended in a way. And that’s this idea that humans could use this imagination to conjure up new worlds or think of new ways of solving problems was something that struck fear into many of the more kind of repressive regimes, whether they were political or religious. They saw the imagination as a threat to the smooth functioning of society. This idea of the imagination was a little scary, and it was only later really when it came to the 18th century when the Enlightenment thinkers, Hobbes and Hume and Kant began to really isolate and identify this power within us, this energy that was the imagination.
And then it became something enormously important in the world and something that was celebrated and revered and seen as something superior to reason. Shelley, the poet, wrote, reason is to imagination as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. So the imagination was put on this pedestal by these poets and by these writers. And what they were saying is they were saying not only can we imagine, but it is our duty to imagine. We have to use this enormous power we have within ourselves to live, to be alive. And that’s really, it’s only a very recent invention, the imagination, in terms of its conscious application to our lives. And this was 200 years ago.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this was like the Romantic era, Keats and those guys. They really romanticized this idea of imagination.
Albert Read: Yes. And they talked about originality as well. And that was another part of it. They thought originality was extremely important. Whereas in the years before that, in the centuries before that, originality wasn’t really considered. And if you think of someone like Shakespeare, he was wildly original in one sense, but he was perfectly happy to take the works of Plutarch and Ovid and Chaucer and Christopher Marlowe and take stories like Romeo and Juliet, which had been told six times before in various forms, and then reinvent them in a way that we wouldn’t really think of doing today in quite the same way. And I’m very interested in the idea of originality and the notion of how original really is something. I write about Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was this wildly inventive breakthrough piece of art, which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, which really reset the journey of art into cubism and into everything that followed. And we think of his work as being almost the benchmark of originality.
But actually, if you look at it, it’s actually taking its inspiration from a number of different sources, whether it’s Cezanne and El Greco, or whether it’s African art or Iberian face masks, and recombining them in a completely new way. And that is the question about originality and about imagination, is do we imagine something completely new, or are we just recirculating the colored glass and the kaleidoscope with the existing elements that are already out there?
Brett McKay: Yeah, that goes to the questions that people are having today about artificial intelligence. What exactly is chat GPT doing when it’s generating an image? And is it the same as our type of imagination that we do as humans?
Albert Read: That is the question that nobody really knows the answer to.
Brett McKay: But it seems like for the time being, imagination is the thing that we can still do better.
It gives us an advantage over the machines. And it’ll probably become an increasingly valuable commodity or resource. So let’s talk about what we can do to strengthen our imagination muscle.
You offer different ideas that you can do to implement in your life to develop your imagination. The first one is observation. And you start the chapter on observation with this statement.
Observation comes before imagination. What do you mean by that?
Albert Read: What I mean is that the imagination is fed by the senses. It’s fed by what we see and what we hear and what we observe.
And we don’t observe nearly as much as we think we do. And we let most of the world pass by without us really noticing it. So what I’m saying in the book is learn to take notice, learn to see what’s around you.
And if you look at the most creative minds in history, they tended to have this ability to see things that other people couldn’t see. They tended to be able to see into another layer of existence, whether it’s an artist or a scientist or even an entrepreneur. They see things that other people glance over.
They spot opportunities because they’re looking that much more closely. So what I’m saying in the book is build ways of behaving that increase your observational power, whether it’s… And I talk about this thing called observational closure. When you, if you really want to see something, you should sketch it or you should describe it in words.
Or if you’re reading a book, you should take notes in the margin. And the other thing I write about is building what I call, what was called in history, a commonplace book, where you take notes of things you’ve read that you found interesting. And then you gradually build up a notebook of your own pulled from many sources.
And then you have this very valuable set of observations that you’ve made over the years. And then you find yourself making connections between them. So really, it’s a way of living where the world is something that is your raw material for your imagination, but you’ve got to be able to capture it and draw it into your mind.
Brett McKay: No, I like that idea of observational closures. It’s basically, it’s not just noticing. It’s you have to do something with it.
You have to tell your brain, I have recorded this. I have actually paid attention to this by putting it in a notebook or I’ve made a note somewhere. Because I think oftentimes, yeah, we just go through our day.
We might notice something that captures our attention and then we just move on and we forget about it.
Albert Read: And I think also there’s a sense of if you don’t achieve observational closure, you somehow feel dissatisfied. The example I use in the book is of a child rushing home to his parents to report on a drama in the school playground.
And the child will have this kind of agitation that they need to tell you what happened, you, the parents. And then in the telling of it, they can somehow relax and they feel they’ve passed it on and they’ve achieved this closure. And I think that is a very simple example of what we feel as adults where something really valuable happens if you take the time to use whatever means you like to use to find a way of recording or systematically encompassing something you’ve observed.
Brett McKay: Going back to this idea of the commonplace book, I love this idea. So it started in the Renaissance and people would just basically have a notebook, a little notebook that they would just jot down notes and quotations from books in it that they were reading. And sometimes you put things under categories.
I think guys like John Locke, he had an index in his commonplace book to add some organization. So it’s kind of like a bullet journal. But the fact that you gave these notes a new organization from the book you just read, mixing different quotes and sources together, that was the point really.
Because it’d help you see new connections and come up with new ideas. And I think people today, they’ve picked up on this idea and they say, well, I can just use my digital devices to create a commonplace book. But you’re a big proponent of keeping an actual physical commonplace book.
Why is that?
Albert Read: I am. I mean, I certainly would use my… If I’m out on the street and I have a thought and I want to record it, I certainly would use my phone to record it. But I will then go back home and I will transfer it to a book with a pen.
My view is that writing, in the act of writing, you absorb something in a completely different and a much more profound way. And I think that if you can build up this treasure trove of observations that you’ve written down, it becomes a more valuable thing. And from a purely practical level, I have a… Let me give you an example.
I have a commonplace book in my bookcase that I completed in my 20s. And I just know that if I put it onto some floppy disk, I would have lost it. So, there is this very practical advantage of pen and paper.
Not only is it a better way of recording in terms of absorbing the information and seeing things on the same page and going back over old pages. And, I see this book looking at me on the shelf and I think I must look at it again. And I do bring it down occasionally.
So for me, it’s what I prefer doing. There are, of course, advantages of technology, but I think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, at least for me.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve had that same experience as you. I have a commonplace book that I had from my 20s where I’d write down quotations and just notes. And I find it more useful than, the digital systems I’ve developed to capture different interesting tidbits I’ve read on the internet.
Because I feel like when you use these tools on your computer, I just like end up capturing everything. Like, oh, I’ll save this and save this and save this. And it becomes so useless.
And then I forget to check it.
Albert Read: Yeah. It’s almost too easy to record it. I think the act of writing is a little bit of an effort. And so you’re a bit more selective about what you record. And also you make more of an effort in recording it. And that effort is what really makes it stick and remain something valuable.
Brett McKay: Okay. So get yourself a commonplace book. Get yourself a little notebook. It could be a Moleskine. Make it fancy.
Albert Read: Moleskine is… Moleskine is great.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think if you make the experience more enjoyable. You’ll enjoy doing it more, and just write down your observations. It could be quotes…
Albert Read: And it also, the writing and drawing, it slows your mind to a more reflective rhythm. It makes your mind open to ideas in a way that if you just quickly write something with your thumb on an iPhone, it just isn’t the same.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And so, yeah, all the stuff you’re observing and recording, this can be the building blocks of new imagination, things you’re going to create in your head. You also have… Okay.
Albert Read: Can I add one more thing to that?
Brett McKay: Sure.
Albert Read: Which is the way you read, I think, is very important. I think we got…
Brett McKay: Oh, tell us about that.
Albert Read: Well, in the Renaissance, people used to read in a completely different way to the way we read now. They would read many books at the same time. They would write in the margins, they would scribble over things, they’d underline things, they’d read books again and again. And we now read books like a chapter at the end of the day when we’re tired, and we’ll read sequentially one book and then another book. And really, what’s interesting is when you have a whole lot of books, maybe four, five, six books going on at the same time, and one book is a novel, one book is a work of science, one book is a history book, you’ll find yourself making connections across those books in the way that they used to in the Renaissance. And that is another valuable element which is connected to commonplace books, which is this idea of connecting the previously unconnected, those things that nobody else has thought of together.
And that’s something which was a great source of great fuel for the imagination in history, this idea that people could pull from science and from art and from history and from whatever else they’re observing. And ideas will come from this clashing of different disciplines and different observations. You see that a bit with people who talk about going on reading weeks. Someone like Bill Gates will go away for a week with a whole bunch of books, and they’re on all sorts of different subjects. And really what he’s doing is replicating what they used to do, this idea of reading widely and exploring areas that are not familiar to you and staring at things that you don’t fully understand.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So let your reading cross-pollinate.
Albert Read: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s something I do. I’m always reading multiple books at the same time, and I just keep them in different parts of the house. So I got a book in my living room, and I got a book in the office. I got a book I’m reading on my phone, and I’m in different parts of them.
Albert Read: Me too.
Brett McKay: And I just read them.
It’s very higgledy-piggledy. I don’t really have a rhyme or reason why I pick up and decide to read them.
Albert Read: That’s exactly it. Higgledy-piggledy is good. That’s the way you should approach it. And going back to technology, I read things on Kindle, I read things on the train, and having that access to lots of different books with a few swipes is an extraordinary power that certainly wasn’t available to our predecessors.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You talk about in the book the unthinking habit. What is that, and how does it get in the way of strengthening our imagination?
Albert Read: The unthinking habit is something which I talk about in relation to life passing us by and habits setting in, which begin to limit the way we can think and the way we see things. There’s a philosopher called William James, the brother of Henry James, who wrote about this, and his view was that by the age of 30, most people’s minds have encrusted in a way. And he says by the age of 30, you’ve more or less set your habits, your thoughts, your political views, and you don’t tend to change much after that. And this has implications for the imagination. So what I’m challenging people to do is to say, get out of this unthinking habit.
Get into a place where you can remain young in your mind, remain open, and embrace the mindset of a beginner, ’cause by doing that, you get out of the habit of thinking of the same things all the time and thinking this is the way the world works, because the world changes around you. And if you’re not changing with it, if you’re not learning and observing and seeing what’s out there because you’ve lost that kind of youthful curiosity, then you’re going to be more limited in what you can achieve. So the question is, what can you do about this? How can you keep this mindset of a beginner through your life? And one very interesting fact that I discovered in the book when I was writing the book was this piece of research that showed that the Nobel Prize winners in science compared to other scientists tended to have a disproportionate interest in the arts.
So while they were great scientists in their free time, in the weekends and evenings, they were also doing something entirely different. They were being artists. So you think of someone like Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin. He was also an artist and a member of the Chelsea Arts Club in London. Or you think of someone like Richard Feynman. He was also a painter, or even Einstein was playing the violin, or Newton was also a poet. So what I find fascinating about these people is they were being great, experienced achievers in their day job. They were being beginners in their leisure time. And that beginner’s mindset is something I think was very important for them. My theory is that that was what made them great. They had this ability to keep their minds open, to keep themselves humble and curious through their art. And then it would take it back to the science.
Brett McKay: Okay. So tip there if you want to avoid the unthinking habit as you get into midlife. I’ve been noticing this in myself. I’m in my 40s now, and I’m starting to notice I’m kind of stuck in my ways. Part of it I like because it’s easy, but there’s a part of it I don’t like this.
Albert Read: It’s a very comfortable feeling.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So one thing you do is just keep trying new things, try new hobbies, become an artist if you want. I know Winston Churchill, he was an artist. He picked up painting.
Albert Read: He was. And that’s another great example of somebody who was… He was learning something new. He was, while he was being the prime minister, he was also struggling with something. And I think that’s really important.
Brett McKay: Another thing I think can help, I’ve been talking to a friend of mine who’s, he’s in his 50s now. He talks about how he’s starting to enjoy hanging out with younger people, like in their 20s. He says, there’s a mentoring part. I want to, I’m in my life, phase of my life where I want to become a mentor. He says, like, I actually enjoy being around them because they’ve got fresh ideas. It’s new. It’s more exciting to talk with them than to talk with people my age who are more stagnant, just talking about getting reading glasses at Walgreens.
Albert Read: I think there’s also a feeling in your 50s, and I’m speaking of somebody, as somebody who’s in their 50s, of the ego sets in. There’s a kind of need to feel right. And if you’ve got to a position where you’re senior in a company, you kind of think, well, I got here because I’m cleverer than everybody else and I made all the right decisions or I made more right decisions than wrong decisions. And so forevermore, whatever I say is likely to be right. And that is the wrong attitude. The correct attitude is to think, I got here through a sequence of lucky breaks and I made a few good calls. But what was true, five years ago may not be true anymore and the thing that I can do to stay in my position and to be good at what I do is to realize that I might be wrong and that I should allow a culture where people can contradict me. And where younger people from different backgrounds with fresh perceptions can come along and say actually I disagree with you and actually the world’s changed.
And that’s a very difficult thing to take on in your 50s or your 40s even. Because I think that’s not the way we like to think about ourselves.
Brett McKay: Okay. So to get out of the unthinking habit try new things even as you are in midlife and your elder years hang out with young people who have got different ideas than you. The thing about imagination is you’re combining stuff in your head to form something new and then you’re testing out in the world to see if it works and sometimes a lot of times ideas don’t work. So imagination will require some risk and I think that’s one reason why people are afraid to be imaginative and/or be publicly imaginative. So how do you learn to become immune to imaginative risk?
Albert Read: Well, I think you learn to be immune from this by detaching your activity from any need to succeed or to be recognized in the outside world as a success. We see creativity as something that we embark upon when we think we can do something better than everybody else or something where we can do something that we can get applauded for it but really what I’m saying is your fear of failure will hold you back and you shouldn’t be thinking, I mean some people think if I can’t imagine successfully the better not to imagine at all and that is the wrong attitude. Because even the most successful people in the creative worlds failed a lot. There’s a saying by WH Auden, the English poet, that good poets write more bad poems than bad poets and I think that’s true.
I think if you think of anyone who one admires greatly as an artist they have had plenty of failures. If you think of David Bowie or Wordsworth, Bowie wrote some terrible music and Wordsworth wrote some terrible poems but in the act of doing those works they also came up with great things and so we have to think of ourselves not only as people comfortable with failure but also thinking of the process of creating is what’s important. It’s the act of creativity not the result that makes you alive and brings out the best in you. That’s what I would say is a different way of looking at things.
Brett McKay: Yeah. So sometimes, a lot of times quantity trumps quality ’cause it’s through quantity that you can get to the quality.
Albert Read: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Albert Read: But also not to think about quality necessarily. Do your best but don’t don’t worry if it doesn’t work.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Another artist who was prolific but we think everything he did was awesome was Bach. So Bach, that guy worked all the time like he was cranking out stuff weekly but we only remember just a handful of the best works that have stood up over time. We forgot about the all the other stuff that he churned out that was just you know okay.
Albert Read: By the way I’d say the same about business. If you think of the great entrepreneurs, if you think of Steve Jobs. Between the first computer and the iPhone, between the Mac and the iPhone, you had the G4 Cube and you had the Apple Lisa, you had these big mistakes but he understood, he thought like an artist. He understood that these frequent attempts at creating, you keep going and often you fail but it’s the failures that are the byproduct of success. The failures are the byproduct of success as opposed to things that lead to some terrible end game.
Brett McKay: And I think another thing going back to this idea that midlife can make it hard to be imaginative. Not only do you get kind of stuck in your thinking ways but oftentimes by the time you’re in midlife, let’s say you’re 40s and 50s, you’ve established a career, you’ve maybe had some success, you’ve spent a lot of time developing a skill set and maybe you reach this point where that’s not working for you anymore the way it was. And you decide I gotta do something different but it can be scary to try something different because like wow if I do that then I’m gonna lose this good thing that I had. Yeah. You said you’re in your 50s and you’re still in this kind of creative world. What have you done to help you get over that imaginative risk in midlife?
Albert Read: Well I wrote this book. This book was something that was entirely new to me and I didn’t know if it was going to work and it was something completely outside of what I’ve been… Although I’ve been working in the creative industries, I’ve been on the business side. So to write a book was something that felt very scary and the risk of failure, the risk of public embarrassment is something you have to deal with and I’m very glad I did.
Brett McKay: So you just gotta do it. There’s no hacks or tricks. You just have to do it.
Albert Read: You’ve gotta do it and if you do it and you don’t succeed you’ve got to think of it in a different way. You’ve got to have a different mindset. There’s a quote I make up in the book which is borrowing from Eleanor Roosevelt. She said this thing. She said, “Do one thing every day that scares you. Those small things that make us uncomfortable help us build courage to do the work we do.” And I’ve said in my book do one imaginative thing every day that scares you.
Scribble a short story, a drawing, an idea to change something around you, or you could compose a piece of music. Because these small imaginative acts will make you uncomfortable, and when you venture to retrieve the piece of paper the following morning they’ll look ridiculous. But you might laugh at yourself and feel some misguided flush of shame but eventually you’ll lose your fear, your self-mockery and your embarrassment and you’ll begin to feel comfortable with imaginative risk, realizing there’s no real risk at all. They’re just ideas and you start to wonder what was I afraid of and you begin to feel stronger. And you realize that by risking yourself imaginatively you will gradually build the courage to do, to echo Eleanor Roosevelt to do the important imaginative work we all need to do. So it’s really a mindset and it’s really a kind of way of living that I think is so rich and fruitful if you throw yourself into it.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And it fits in nicely, that idea, fits in nicely with the idea of the imagination is a muscle like you just have to exercise it’s painful it can hurt sometimes.
Albert Read: Exactly. It’s like working out in the gym. It’s you know it starts off being painful but it gets easier and you get fitter and you get stronger and you feel more alive.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You have this section about 18th century coffee houses and how social connections can help us increase our imaginations. What can we learn from the 18th century coffee house?
Albert Read: Well, I have this chapter in the book called Talking to Strangers, and it starts with this idea of me, if I go into a coffee shop in London, and I observe this, everyone grabbing their coffee from Starbucks and walking off to work. And actually, right by this coffee shop, where I bought the coffee was a sign saying, here’s to the first London coffee house at the sign of Pasqua Rosée’s head. Pasqua Rosée was this guy, this Turkish guy who came to London, and in 1652, opened the first coffee shop. And it’s hard to imagine now, but coffee didn’t exist. And nobody knew what it was. But it was an enormous success. And it spawned other coffee shops very quickly.
And then gradually, what was just a coffee shack became a coffee shop with big wooden rooms, wooden floors and sofas. And it really led to the explosion of thought and energy in London, it was an amazing period. And what it did, really was, it had a double effect of caffeine, energizing and sharpening people’s minds, because until then, they were drinking warm beer most of the time, and they were mostly drunk. So in London, suddenly, everyone was super alert and sharp. And then the other thing that it engendered was this mingling of people which had never happened before, because all thought and all debate took place within academic institutions or the church.
So suddenly, you had these kind of democratic gatherings of people from all sorts of different backgrounds, you had great scientists, you had just regular people coming in, and they would all talk and share ideas. And it attracted people like Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin. It led to the birth of the insurance market and the finance, the City of London and Lloyd’s, and the first newspapers and magazines. And really what this represents is something that has been repeated in different ways across history, which is this idea of a cluster, this idea of people coming together and having ideas which they wouldn’t have sitting on their own.
And you see it at the salons of the French Enlightenment, you see it at the Harlem Renaissance, you see it in the medieval times at the Baghdad House of Wisdom. And really, what I’m saying in the chapter called Talking to Strangers is find ways of recreating the coffee shops, find ways of mingling with people that you may not agree with, but they will sharpen you and you will sharpen them. And it’s in these gatherings that interesting things happen. Silicon Valley is another great example of that.
Brett McKay: Do you think you can replicate this on the internet? Some people say, well, x.com is the coffee shop. What do you think about that?
Albert Read: I think it has certain advantages. It’s rather like, I don’t want to sound like a Luddite, but it’s rather like the writing in a commonplace book. I do believe that actually physical encounters have a value to them that digital encounters don’t have. I think they both have value. I think the digital world of bringing people together with common interests is incredibly powerful. And I do think Twitter is a particularly good example. There have been good things about it. But certainly, scholars, researchers can mingle in ways that they couldn’t do before using the internet. So I definitely think it has an advantage. But I wouldn’t discount the physical environment and say that the virtual environment does the job in its entirety.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I’d agree with that. My experience, I’ve been on the internet and I like rubbing digital shoulders with people. But there’s something about being with a group of people in person, the dynamic is completely different. I feel something about it, it leaves more of an impression on me when I’m with people in person. And then the ideas… I don’t know. Everyone’s had that experience, after you had this great conversation with a bunch of different people, you just feel enlivened and it gets you thinking about different things. That doesn’t happen so much after I spend a few minutes on X.
Albert Read: It’s harder, I think. And I think people need to connect in the room in order to open up, in order to relax in a way. And I think the other thing to remember is, or rather to point out is that many great geniuses in history, we think of as individual geniuses. You think of Shakespeare or Charles Darwin or Virginia Woolf to take three British examples. They were geniuses, but they were surrounded by other brilliant people. And it was in this atmosphere of what I would call mild competitiveness that really their greatness was drawn out. And without that cluster of people around them, I’m not sure they would have achieved what they did achieve in the end.
Brett McKay: Yeah. You see that with CS Lewis and Tolkien, the Inklings.
Albert Read: Exactly. Yes. And you see it with the Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s with Steve Wozniak and… They were collaborators, but they were also trying to impress each other. And that’s a very powerful force in making progress.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, another place where you see that was in America, in Concord with the Transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller.
Albert Read: Yes.
Brett McKay: They were friends and they were exchanging ideas, but they were also competing against each other. There was a little bit of friendly rivalry there.
Albert Read: Yeah. You’ve got to be on your metal when you’re in the room with those people.
Brett McKay: Yeah. How are you doing that? How are you incorporating stranger talk these days? Are you going into Starbucks and saying, Hey, what’s going on? What’s the news?
Albert Read: I tried that. It didn’t really work. I think people look at you weirdly if you try and strike up a conversation in Starbucks these days. I think the day of the coffee shop being a gathering of people is gone. I think the world’s too big. I think there’s too much suspicion. I think in a way that doesn’t work quite. It’s got to be more organized than that these days. I do it through my social life, I guess, mostly through having interesting friends and trying to bring people together at dinners and at parties who may not agree with each other. But I think this idea of agreeing and disagreeing is something else that has gone a little bit wrong possibly where if you disagree with somebody, then an awkwardness might set in. Whereas I think disagreeing with somebody is actually much more interesting than agreeing with somebody. I’d much rather sit next to somebody at dinner who I disagreed with than I agreed. I think how interesting. And let me see if… Maybe check my assumptions. That’s something which social media has possibly eroded a little.
Brett McKay: Yeah. We atrophied that skill.
Albert Read: I think so, yeah.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I just had an idea of what you can do to incorporate getting together in person with strangers to bounce off ideas and increase your imagination. We had this guy on the podcast named Nick Gray. And he wrote a book called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. And he talks about just like this thing you can do. It’s a 2-Hour Cocktail Party. You invite different people. And it’s just two hours. It has a very short time limit. It doesn’t take much work. And it’s… First off, people just love socializing, but he talks about that lots of different cool things have sprung up from these two-hour cocktail parties. Businesses have been formed, relationships have been formed, nonprofits, etcetera. So that’s another, we’ll link to that show in the show notes, The 2-Hour Cocktail Party.
Albert Read: Yeah. Great. I’d like to listen to it.
Brett McKay: So another thing you talk about, something you do to strengthen your imagination muscle that called to me, was walking outside in nature. How can that help our imagination?
Albert Read: Well, walking is, I think, the best form of exercise when it comes to the imagination.
It’s the most natural physical activity, and hence the most beneficial to the imagination. It improves blood flow and it stimulates creative thinking, but it’s not kind of making us busy by movement. It’s not running and jogging and playing sports.
They’re all kind of exerting us to the point where we can’t really think at the same time. So it’s this kind of equilibrium of being and doing that I like about walking. You’re walking, it’s a natural rhythm, but you’re not distracted by it. And it kind of releases you from the burden of the self. It kind of, it’s this kind of de-clutching thing where you’re removed the kind of immediacy of your existence. And I find walking is when I have the best ideas. Often it’s a bit of a time into a walk. It could be half an hour, 40 minutes into a walk. And then things emerge, things get jogged into view as you keep walking.
Brett McKay: No. I have that experience too. And lots of great philosophers have had that same idea. Aristotle, his fathers are called peripatetics because they just walked around everywhere. Nietzsche, it’s all the truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.
Albert Read: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Kierkegaard, another big walker. Kant, I guess the town set their clocks to his daily walking schedule. So. Yeah.
Albert Read: Yeah. Charles Dickens.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And Darwin is another one. He would get up in the morning and he’d do his work and then for the rest of the day, he’d just go for a walk and just hang out.
Albert Read: Yeah. I write a lot about Wordsworth and his walking in the book. And somebody came to see him and his sister was there and she said, and they said, where is he? And he said, he’s out, he’s in a study. She said, he’s out, he’s out walking. His study is in the outdoors, and this idea of walking as being work in terms of creativity, I think is very important. And they walk for miles, Wordsworth and Coleridge would walk for hundreds of miles and they’d walk for 20 miles to post a letter. They had this completely different approach to walking.
Brett McKay: Yeah. They weren’t just walking around the block. I think people in the 21st century think, “Oh, let’s go for a 15-minute walk around the block, which, that has some benefits, like go do that. But these guys were on a whole different level. They were walking hours.
Albert Read: Hours. Wordsworth’s friend, Thomas De Quincey, estimated that by middle age, that Wordsworth had walked 180,000 miles, which… That’s a lot.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And they weren’t listening to their podcast. They were just thinking. They were just alone with their thoughts.
Albert Read: Exactly. It was a way of life, which we can’t all spend our whole time walking. We have other things to do, but if we can build walking into our lives in some form, it’s very valuable for the imagination.
Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, Albert, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Albert Read: They can go to my website. I’ve got a reading list. I’ve got notes on my book. But the book is really the kernel of everything that I’ve got to say on the subject. So I hope people will read it and enjoy it.
Brett McKay: Well, Albert Read, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Albert Read: Thank you. Great pleasure talking to you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Albert Read. He’s the author of the book, The Imagination Muscle. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, albertread.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/imagination, where you find links to resources when we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get your viewing up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to AOM podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.
